As promised during the google IO Extended 2017 by the GDG Lagos, we are presenting to you the Actions on Google challenge by the GDG Lagos where you stand a chance of winning a Google Home and also a chance at grabbing one of the prizes for the global Actions on Google challenge [ https://developers.google.com/actions/challenge/ ]

Information

This challenge is simple.

Register for the challenge in this short form [ https://goo.gl/forms/9oFdSpObIrt3gYYZ2 ]. Registration is required for participation and remains open till 4th of July. (Late registration extends till the 10th of July)

Your app will be evaluated and scored based on creativity, relevance, quality, and usage by our judges.

Winners will be selected and announced in August.

Submission process

Submitting your app involves creating the app with instructions on how to use the app, the command set and brief introduction of the app.

You will then be required to invite the judges by granting privileges to your console simulator for the app where the app will be tested and properly evaluated by the judges. The simulator has a ‘share’ button that you can use to invite others to your amazing app. The judges, will be invited by the participant to the app where they will be able to test the app – it’s interactivity and correctness.

Only apps that have gone through the submission process on or before the 27th of July will be reviewed.

We will accept one app entry per user.

If selected as a winner of the local challenge, you will be guided on submission for the global challenge where if your app wins, you stand a chance to win even more amazing prizes.

Thousands of developers expected to be in attendance when it starts on Wednesday May 17 (ends on May 19) and it is being held at the outdoor Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View California.

All the major sessions will be streamed live and you do not have to miss out on those. We will share the link to the livestream page once it kicks off on Wednesday. Follow us on Twitter to get notified on this.

The schedule for the sessions is already out. And split up into various categories and areas of interest.

You can mark the ones you are interested in – optionally, the app will notify you once that session is starting. The schedule will be updated regularly until the event.
You can also download the app for Android or iOS.

And what’s more, Nigeria is not left out on the series of I/O Extended events happening across the world. The GDG Lagos crew will announce the I/O extended event too soon!

Launchpad Build is an event series aimed at raising awareness, amongst intermediate and expert developers with an existing Web or Android application, on how they can leverage the power of Firebase to improve their productivity. With Firebase, developers are able to quickly develop high-quality applications, grow your user base and earn more money.

Come engage in talks and hands-on codelabs covering Firebase 2.0 with a focus on Analytics, Cloud Messaging, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Pirate Metrics, Serverless with Firebase, Tensor Flow and much more. Through the Launchpad Build event, developers will get skills and resources necessary to start using Firebase in their applications.

This is a technical event, with multiple sessions on Firebase, facilitated by Googlers and Google Developer Experts from around the world.

Progressive Web Apps are experiences that combine the best of the web and the best of apps. They load quickly, even on flaky networks, can re-engage with users by sending web push notifications, have an icon on the home screen and load as top-level, full screen experiences.

Please join us this Saturday the 20th to learn about the future of the web with Progressive Web Apps, why they are important and how to build and deploy them effectively. Do you have questions around how you can make your web app progressive? Come with them.

Meet with Andreas Bovens (Opera for Android Product Manager & Dev Relations lead at Opera Software) and Top Google Developer Experts Ire Aderinokun, Kenneth Christiansen, Juarez Filho, Eugene Mutai & Femi Taiwo as they take us through the day.

Progressive Web Apps are experiences that combine the best of the web and the best of apps. They load quickly, even on flaky networks, can re-engage with users by sending web push notifications, have an icon on the home screen and load as top-level, full screen experiences.

Please join us to learn about the future of the web with Progressive Web Apps, why they are important and how to build and deploy them effectively.

The event will take place in 3 locations in Sub-Saharan Africa:

Nairobi, Kenya: Monday, 15 August 2016

Lagos, Nigeria: Thursday, 18 August 2016

Johannesburg, South Africa: Monday, 22 August 2016

Registration is free, by invitation only, and shortlisted attendees will be contacted in early August.

It’s also the year Android developers need to do more than build apps that just work. We need to start considering that our users have low-end devices with limited hardware resources and poor internet connectivity. A lot of them also have pre-L devices. Here’s more data to back that up.

Whether or not your users still enjoy using your apps is totally up to you then. They deserve the best experience possible irrespective of their kind of device. They deserve beautiful apps with interesting transitions that are not heavy and doesn’t consume a lot of their data. It’s entirely up to you, the Android developer, to deliver that to them.

Instead of just talking about it, the GDG Lagos team is working on greatly increasing the level of skill and knowledge of Android developers in our ecosystem and for the next two months we would like to run a weekend series on Android development (and soon after Web) using best practices, introducing new tools and much more. This series will hold every two weeks. We plan to measure the impact of the programme in the months following it and make the program better based on feedback from the participants.

At each of the series, we plan to have between 30 and 50 developers. We will also carefully and rigorously select the attendees based on their current skill level, interests and previous interactions to ensure we have the maximum possible impact as far as this sort of events go. Each event will be 3 hours long. Each event will have one speaker. Each event will go in-depth into any of the topics covered.

All our speakers are going to come from within the community as we hope to increase the visibility of good Android developers we have. Based on the projected impact on the community, after the two months is up we hope to have a Call for papers and open up the speaker slots to any interested developers in the region. We want speakers we might have missed out on and has built or is working on something awesome and wants to share the process with the community.

Our vision is to make more Android developers in the region care about the apps they build and make them proud enough to want to talk about it. We want to read more stories about how the strategies they took to optimize app performance for their users while following best practices and latest Android technologies.

We can only have our fingers crossed as we hope that the impact of this program will increase the quality of apps coming out of Lagos.

Join the Firebase Team for a two-hour live streamed developer #AskFirebase Q&A from wherever you are. On May 26th at 11:00 PM [Yes – that’s kind of late in Nigeria but it’s at 3PM PDT] you will be able to ask James Tamplin, co-founder of #Firebase, and +Magnus Hyttsten, Firebase Developer Advocate, questions about Firebase LIVE! Make sure to start posting your questions today with #AskFirebaseLive.